CHAPTER XI
HOW THE STAGE WAS SET FOR THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Thus England's star went setting in the West; but in the East coincidentally it rose continuously to greater glory. Plassey had given Bengal into her hands; Wandewash had made her authority dominant in Southern India. But as yet it was not England, the nation and the King of England, that held this scarcely defined authority. It was the great trading concern known as the East India Company.
"Some have greatness thrust upon them"; and this was remarkably true of the empire of India which Great Britain was really compelled by the force of circumstances to assume. The trading company did not desire to govern the country: they wished to fulfil their original purpose of trade, of making money. It was the aggression of the French and the oppression of the native ruler of Bengal, as we have seen, which obliged them to fight for the very liberty to trade. Further, they were compelled to maintain some kind of order in the districts in which they thus became supreme. It was not easy for them to do this under their charter as traders. The government of the native princes of Bengal was inefficient and corrupt and the people under them were in misery. An Act of the British Parliament in 1773 appointed a Governor-General with powers over all the British possessions in India. Warren Hastings, a civilian in the Company's service, was the first to hold that high post, and with a strong hand he reduced to nothing the powers of the worst of the native rulers and made the government of the better among them less ineffective and corrupt. With the rulers of some of the independent States he entered into treaties and alliances. The idea of Britain's Indian Empire seems to have been born in the brain of Warren Hastings.
Warren Hastings
And the peculiar conditions of India made the realisation of that idea not only possible but inevitable. Through the whole of her story Hindustan has been a land of constant strife between various races settled on her soil and between those settled races and warlike tribes coming down upon her from the north through the passes of her great boundary mountains, the Himalayas. But the greatest cleavage of all among her people was that which still exists between the Moslems and the Hindus of the Buddhist faith. All the many divisions have been causes of jealousies and fighting, but none so constant and prolonged as those due to these two opposed faiths. It is that opposition, in the main, which has made the British Empire in India both possible and necessary—possible, because without that cleavage there might well have been a union of native strength sufficient to withstand the British domination, and necessary, because at every step the British found their trade and their peace imperilled by disturbances beyond the latest limits within which they had made good their authority. They were impelled, for their own mere safety, to push that authority further and further again. And it was a necessity imposed on them also by consideration for the sufferings of the natives in some of the worst governed States. It was a veritable "white man's burden" laid, of no will of their own, and sometimes sorely against their will, upon their shoulders.
WARREN HASTINGS